131–140 of 180 posts
America is #1 for sure (if you're rich!)
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> The staff up was to counter that Stated reasons may or may not be actual. If you recall these were not just accountants but agents who carry guns etc. I see this as very similar to the ICE situation. Biden has loyalty and power in IRS and so gave it money to help him police. As the government gets more corrupted I think we’ll find more agencies weaponized like this.
Can you provide proof of this “loyalty and power” at the IRS to Biden mentioned? Because without proof, it sounds like a “deep state” conspiracy theory without evidence.
The equivalent question is can you provide proof that ICE provides power and is loyal to Trump?
I don’t think you would say that’s a deep state conspiracy.
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> Get rid of sales tax, property tax, exemptions, IRAs, 401ks, short capital gains, long capital gains, medicare, state, all of that bullcrap. Annualized, non-annualized, credits for having an EV on the 4th day of the second Tuesday while being a fisherman, married and single filing differences, end all of that. I agree with your overall point of simplifying taxes by merging more things into income tax, but some of t…
I... don't understand how that excuses complexity? what stops "local governments" from applying same type of tax as higher levels? why would they need taxes specific for them?
It's theoretically possible for a local government to levy an income tax, but a lot would need to change -- much more than just changing tax rates. Employers and banks report income to the federal government (and states, I suppose, but I live and work in Texas so I don't know much about that). They would have to report that information to towns and cities too. There's also the problem of granularity -- how does an employer or bank know where someone actually lives? If you have a P.O. box in a town, do you have to pay taxes in that town? If you work in a different municipality (not uncommon!), do you have to pay taxes there too? If you have a home in one town, work in another, but spend most of your free time hanging out in a third, are you completely off the hook for supporting the third town?
You could have the federal government collect all the money and then allocate it to state and local governments, but that's a massive change in how American society works, and I'm not sure it's any less complex in the end. Some of the complexity in the tax code (e.g. different levels of capital gains tax) is a policy choice, but some of it reflects the complexity of the real world.
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Can you provide proof of this “loyalty and power” at the IRS to Biden mentioned? Because without proof, it sounds like a “deep state” conspiracy theory without evidence.
I can provide evidence that the IRS and the majority of its employees have good relationships with democrats. The equivalent question is can you provide proof that ICE provides power and is loyal to Trump? I don’t think you would say that’s a deep state conspiracy.
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Please don’t play the victim… again. This has nothing to do with you. The downvotes are because you posted an interview with someone directly involved in DOGE fraud, with a supervisory position. His articulations are not compelling, for obvious reasons.
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I... don't understand how that excuses complexity? what stops "local governments" from applying same type of tax as higher levels? why would they need taxes specific for them?
Well, local governments (cities and towns) also have expenses -- police, fire departments, trash collection, water and sewage, roads, public works. Schools are partially funded locally. That has to be paid for. It's theoretically possible for a local government to levy an income tax, but a lot would need to change -- much more than just changing tax rates. Employers and banks report income to the federal government (…
“Theoretically possible” in that thousands of local jurisdictions, among about 1/3 of US states, already do either income or payroll taxes or both.
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Ok what about for the people that mainly earn their living not from an income paid by a job; ie the richest people in the country?
That's an excellent criticism of the parent and why we really do want a somewhat complex tax code even if it should be far simpler than what we have today. We also want to balance regressive and progressive taxes, we do want to influence some behaviors through taxes that provide positive social outcomes - there are several really good complexities to have in our tax code. Just not as many as we do today.
So much of that complexity doesn't even really matter to most people anyways, there are a handful of credits most people may qualify for and then the standard deduction is more than something like 40% of people's itemized deductions. And those credits are usually one time events around particular events/purchases that are relatively well advertised. The most annoying one I've had is when the EV credit required me and my wife to file separately to qualify for.
It's so silly to think the entirety of the tax problem can be solved with one simple straight forward fix like the one proposed here. It's imo one of the peak examples of "broken tech brain" where people think the whole complexity of a situation can be solved with "one neat trick" kind of solutions. Far from exclusive to the tech world but I do see a lot of it from tech.
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That “415:1” is misleading and manipulative. The target rate of recovery is ~10:1, which is roughly what the IRS actually achieves. Audits are not an infinite money glitch. I used to work for a Federal audit agency that also recovered ~10:1. The reason we target 10:1 recovery on audits is because the return on funding additional audits beyond that falls off very sharply. Furthermore, more aggressive auditing greatly…
I'll admit - the 415:1 was pulled from an article detailing information from 2024 but the main point isn't the actual value but the fact that it's more than 1:1. When the IRS receives more funding the US government gets more money than what it is budgeting - this doesn't scale to infinity, at some point you'll have nearly complete auditing capture and more budget will just be burning money but we're no where near tha…
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> maybe we should change that and have a simpler system with much less complexity Wholeheartedly agree, but I see the root cause of the issue being income tax itself. As soon as you tax income, you'll go down and endless rabbit hole of what's fair to tax, how much, what kind of income, investment income vs wage income, percentage vs flat rate, etc... That gave us the mess we have. I like the idea of consumption tax e…
Consumption taxes are almost always regressive and improperly place the majority of the tax burden on the poor - they're good to have (especially the sin taxes and tax discounts on specific encouraged behaviors) but they should be coupled with taxes on wealth (aka property) and income. And these taxes should be somewhat complex - just not to the extent we have today.
Why?
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Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.[1]